I have a colleague who is into clowning. He recently attended a workshop where one of the presenters was a clown who does his clowning in the D.C. area (not a politician). He reported that as he was on his way to perform at a birthday party, already in clown mode, he was pulled over by a cop. When the cop asked for his drivers license (I can just picture the cop saying "this picture doesn't look like you") he also handed him one of his business cards. The cop let him continue on to his gig.

Last week one of the kids in my confirmation class said he saw a creepy clown in a neighboring small town. Someone asked him where the clown was and he answered that it was under the bridge south of town. I politely informed him that if it was under a bridge it must have been a troll. I suppose that is an easy mistake to make.

__________________Old Pain In The Ass says: I am on a mission from God to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable; to bring faith to the doubtful and doubt to the faithful.

Such scolding words, however, shrivel into nothingness in the face of a single number: 38 billion. With its latest promise of military aid, the United States has essentially sanctioned Israel’s impunity, its endless colonization of Palestinian land, its military occupation of the West Bank, and its periodic attacks by F-16 fighter jets and Apache helicopters using Hellfire missiles on the civilians of Gaza.

Yes, Hamas’s crude and occasionally deadly rockets sometimes help provoke Israeli fire, and human rights investigations have found that both sides have committed war crimes. But Israel’s explosive power in the 2014 Gaza war, fueled in large part by American military aid and political support, exceeded that of Hamas by an estimated 1,500-to-1. By one estimate, all of Hamas’s rockets, measured in explosive power, were equal to 12 of the one-ton bombs Israel dropped on Gaza. And it loosed hundreds of those, and fired tens of thousands of shells, rockets and mortars. In the process, nearly 250 times more Palestinian civilians died than civilians in Israel.

I wouldn't call them neo-nazis, they are their own very small group of fringe nutcases. They want a monarch, after all. I don't think it's being ignored, I just checked two big sites (Spiegel and Sueddeutsche) and both have several articles at the top of the page.

I think in some sense the opposite is happening - they aren't really organized and have been mostly ignored, but because one of them happened to have guns and used them, the media are trying to detect a pattern.

I'm from Cleveland. Nobody knows shit about the supposed man the team name is honoring, except that they're supposed to say they're honoring a former player. That's the extent of it. I never heard Louis Sockalexis's name when I lived there. I did hear people say that Chief Wahoo was the name of the player and so the logo honors him too. It's not. Chief Wahoo is just an offensive racial caricature, nothing more, and has no connection to Sockalexis. Chief Wahoo was not his nickname or anything.

Apparently I missed one other detail: Sockalexis never played for the Cleveland Indians.

The Cleveland Indians were originally from Grand Rapids and moved to Cleveland after Sockalexis's retirement. The Cleveland Spiders were a different team.

As a soldier, Abramovich was severely wounded in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He suffered burns over most of his body when he tried to pull the members of his crew out of the burning tank that he was driving. He was later awarded a medal for his heroism.

The aforementioned film shows Golan chasing after Abramovich, screaming, “You are a traitor to your people, you piece of garbage! It’s too bad you didn’t burn to death in your tank. … He’s the reason that the soldier [Azaria] is in jail.”

Gal was shocked, and rightly so. It is quite possible that his well-honed senses warned him that Golan had caused enormous damage to the right’s public image and the struggle to obtain the release of Azaria, who is now on trial. As Gal wrote on his Facebook page, “There is a vast chasm separating Amnon Abramovich and me, a C-H-A-S-M. Nevertheless, it disgusts me to see one Jew say to another Jew, ‘It’s too bad that you were only injured in your tank during the Yom Kippur War, and that you weren’t killed.’ There is no place for that. It is inappropriate.”

Suddenly the roles were reversed. From that very moment, Gal himself became a “leftist” and punching bag for the right. A thick shadow was cast over his reliability. He was pummeled on his Facebook page in a campaign led by Golan and his friends. While the online discussion shows that Gal tried to explain why Golan and his friends are actually harming the right-wing cause, no one paid him any attention.